Canonical formula calculator
Customer Acquisition Cost
What it actually costs you to acquire one new customer, marketing and sales combined.
Total marketing spend over the period (ads, content, tools, agencies).
Salaries, commissions, tools, demos, anything sales-related. Enter 0 if you have no separate sales spend.
How many net-new paying customers you added in the same period.
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Add context for case suggestions
Optional — helps us match this calculation against relevant case studies (coming soon).
What this tells you
CAC is what it costs you, in real dollars, to add one new customer to your business — counting both marketing spend and sales spend. It is one of the few numbers that separates businesses that grow profitably from businesses that grow themselves into the ground.
When to use it
Calculate CAC monthly or per campaign. Watch the trend. Compare it to your gross margin per customer — if CAC is climbing faster than what each customer is worth, growth is destroying value, not creating it.
What it doesn’t tell you
CAC alone is meaningless without context. A $200 CAC is great if customers stay for years and spend thousands; it is a death sentence if customers leave after one purchase. Always look at CAC alongside customer lifetime value and payback period.
Track it, don’t just calc it
A calculator gives you today’s number. Reckon turns it into a goal you can watch: declare it as a number and a date, log progress by hand, and get a deterministic verdict with a real arrival date. No AI, no guessing — the same input always gives the same answer.